[Must Read] "Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice" by Mark Singleton

Written by Taina Rodriguez-Berardi
October 1, 2020

I’ve practiced yoga in many places—from Los Angeles to New York City to Buenos Aires and Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. Though thousands of miles and years apart, my experience was relatively uniform no matter the language or the place: within a boutique studio and/or a communal space, I rolled out a synthetic yoga mat to take part in a sequence of physical postures (āsana) that are internationally recognized, sold, and promoted as modern yoga practice. Until fairly recently, I never thought to question this homogenized experience. Yet, as a budding yoga scholar and academic, this has changed. Contemplating these and other global yoga encounters, I began to question: What of yoga’s South Asian origins, devotional practices, focus on meditation, breathwork (prāṇāyāma) and achieving ultimate liberation? And, how is it that postural, body-oriented yoga practices have become ubiquitous in the mainstream of Western culture?

Author, scholar of yoga and Senior Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London, Mark Singleton wrote his book, Yoga Body, in order to investigate exactly this rise in prominence of yoga āsana in what he coins as transnational anglophone yoga. (Singleton 2010, p. 3) Singleton expounds upon this central research question and asserts that āsana, as principal to the practice of yoga, is a relatively new and adaptive reframing that is the result of “dialogical exchange between para-religious, modern body culture techniques developed in the West and the various discourses of “modern” Hindu yoga” that emerged from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Singleton 2010, p. 5) Amongst many factors, Singleton focuses on several key themes that lay the foundation for this development: 1) the regard of haṭha yogins and interpretation of haṭha yoga practices from medieval to modern times, 2) the medicalization of yoga and co-mingling of Western physical culture amidst a rise in Hindu nationalism, and 3) the global perpetuation of yoga from the unique perspective of key gatekeepers and teachers.

Singleton outlines a holistically reductive cultural treatment of haṭha yoga and its early practitioners. Emerging from traditions of tantric and ascetic practices, haṭha yoga was codified in multiple medieval texts including the Śivasaṃhitā (c. fourteenth-century CE), the Haṭhayogapradīpikā, (c. fifteenth-century CE), and the Gheraṇḍasaṃhitā (c. eighteenth-century CE). Focusing on “queer” tapas practices, or austerities, that cleansed and firmed the physical body in preparation for subsequent subtle body engagement and liberative endeavors, haṭha yogins were seen by both Indian elites and Europeans as wielding black magic, conducting perverse sexual exploits in the name of spirituality or religion, and as difficult people to bring to order, or pacify. (Singleton 2010, pp. 35-39) Haṭha yoga ascetic practices were outlawed during the British Raj, ridiculed as sideshow oddities in European travel depictions and were regarded as an antithetical to the meditation renunciate of Indian ideal. (Singleton 2010, p. 39) These perceptions aided the rejection of haṭha yoga techniques as valid forms of yoga and set the stage for a re-imagining of an “authentic” yoga that emerged from colonial India.

A new era of Hindu nationalism emerged from 1895 – 1915 and with this, a desire to re-evaluate haṭha yoga practices under an emerging light of modern science, medicine and the application of yogic techniques for therapeutic, health and wellness purposes. Brothers S.C. Vasu and Major Basu, were part of a growing movement to reinterpret haṭha yoga text and practices from a scientific perspective. Their work layered physical body and subtle body practices while attempting to attribute medical terminology and therapeutic pathology to legitimize and promulgate haṭha yoga as benefit for lifestyle health. (Singleton 2010, pp. 50-53)

Another aspect of emerging Hindu nationalism took aim at promoting and developing forms of Indian culture such as gymnastics, body building and yoga as a means to contest the Oriental “degeneracy narrative” that plagued Indian identity. (Singleton 2010, pp. 95-97) This alongside an influx of Western physical culture brought to India via British colonial rule, the YMCA and a social Darwinist eugenics movement, cultivates an open exchange of ideas and further development of yoga āsana as a leading feature in forming insurrection against the Company and British Raj. (Singleton 2010, pp. 102-103)

Additionally, the perpetuation of new media, like photography, as well as the growing globalized world of the early 20th century, encouraged the dissemination and reception of a few innovative, teachers who applied a surging movement of physical culture, harmonial gymnastics, and strength building techniques to help usher in a new era of āsana focused yoga. Swami Kuvaalayananda, Shri Yogenra and T. Krishnamacharya and his students (Pattahbi Jois, B.K.S Iyengar, T.K.V. Desikachar and Indra Devi) are among the most influential.

Singleton outlines these reasons, and many more, as underlying, foundational factors in the cultivation and popularity of postural yoga forms practiced today across the globe. By his definition, transnational anglophone yoga consists of multiple sources of inspiration, innovation, dissemination, and continued interpretation.